Note: This article was originally published in The Technology Source (http://ts.mivu.org/) as: Joel Foreman "Trading Mules for Tractors: The Pros and Cons of Adopting a Course Management System" The Technology Source, January/February 2001. Available online at http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=1034. The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher.

Imagine a world in which the online course management system
(CMS) is as ubiquitous as the chalkboard. If the hype of the
major CMS vendors is to be trusted (Blackboard.com cites 3,300
institutional licensees, and WebCT claims six million student
accounts), such a future may not be far off. The investments of
venture capitalists, such as the Carlyle Group and Kestrel
Venture Management, are working to realize this vision. Based on
my four-semester experience as a WebCT user, I provide a reality
check for this trend, highlighting some of the benefits and
shortcomings of WebCT and speculating about the advances required
to make the CMS a standard in every class.

Registration and Retention

On a positive note, WebCT features a course registration
process that has significantly boosted the retention rates in my
distance courses.

Before WebCT, I always scheduled face-to-face (f2f)
orientations with my online students. Contrary to my
expectations, these orientations produced more problems than
solutions. Some students decided that the distance technology was
more than they wished to handle. Some were convinced that they
could manage it but discovered that they couldnt and
dropped out in the first few weeks of the course. Some missed the
required orientation and could not add the course after the
semester started. All of these factors produced one unintended
consequence: a low retention rate.

After adopting WebCT, I solved the retention problem with
online enrollment that eliminated the need for a f2f orientation.
The online enrollment process begins with a handout that students
pick up from the English Department. The handout directs them to
access George Mason Universitys WebCT site, enter a
username and password, go to the course homepage, and send me
some personal information via the systems internal mail
function. I estimate that about 10% of the applicants fail to
negotiate these procedures and give up. Another 15% have problems
but resolve them by e-mailing me for help. The end result is that
the students who succeed with the enrollment are eased into the
digital world of the CMS, have their efforts reinforced, and are
inclined to persist when they encounter other technological
challenges.

Perhaps most importantly, the retention numbers suggest what
we have been expecting: with each passing year, more students are
computer literate and thus able to benefit (without undue
anxiety) from a complex CMS. Now we should ask the
following: At what point will those students start to pressure
their schools to provide online systems for most or all of their
courses?

Automation and the Cost of Time

Should such student pressure become a force for change, most
teachers are still not likely to respond by adopting a CMS until
the systems are as easy to operate as the tools (paper and f2f
classroom) of conventional pedagogy.

The WebCT feature that best demonstrates that operational ease
is the registration process. Once students register with a simple
login procedure, their names simultaneously appear in the grade
book, internal mail system, bulletins (an asynchronous discussion
database), and student homepages. Having the student names
in place thereafter enables the automation of each of these
sub-systems. This automation of multiple functions produces very
specific and significant savings in instructor labor, which is
what we should expect from a powerful CMS.

However, WebCT demands far more effort than is required of a
conventional instructor. The grade book is a good example of this
complication. Its best and simplest component allows students to
track their grades; students enjoy this feature because they like
to have a record of their accumulating grades. Advanced users of
the system can program it to calculate final grades and to show
students their grades relative to the grades of others in the
class. The problem with the component is that setting up and
maintaining the system takes much more time than does a paper
grade book.

At the root of this and other time management issues is the
labor required to access the WebCT course space. Getting access
requires five steps of users: going to GMU's WebCT homepage,
clicking on "course listing," selecting the semester,
selecting the course, and entering usernames and passwords. These
repetitive steps add up significantly when one calculates how
many accesses are required in the course of a semester. On a
typical day, a few student inquiries require that I go online to
check a grade, change a password, review an assignment or part of
the syllabus, review an asynchronous discussion, or upload and
download files. Not a single one of these actions is required of
conventional teachers.

Under ideal circumstances, a CMS user will have the course
space online at all times, allowing him/her to go into it quickly
when needed. This is possible if the user is linked to a LAN or
has a DSL line or cable modem (as is the case for me). Still,
having the course space available all the time is not always
enough to limit the effort required for annoying and repetitious
processes that sometimes have little to do with student learning.

Here is a case in point: I teach two different WebCT courses,
a graduate course on organizational learning and a business
writing course, and I teach two different sections of the latter.
Each course and section requires a separate login procedure and a
different access code. Thus, if I have WebCT open to the site of
one of my English sections, and I need to go into the other
section, I have to repeat a time-consuming, multi-step procedure
that ends only when I key in a username that looks like this:
ENGL302B17S00. Day in and day out, this process gets tedious.

File Exchange System

Perhaps the most laborious feature of WebCT is the file
exchange process, which remains the most necessary and
time-consuming part of a distance writing course. My students
send their Word documents to me via WebCTs internal mail
system, and I return them via the same route. The main problem
with the file exchange is the amount of time and the number of
repetitive steps required to download or upload documents.
Returning 40 documents takes about 20 minutes if the system is
working at peak speed. In this case, being able to hand a paper
document to a student is far better than carefully performing
68 mouse clicks to send or retrieve a document. WebCT's
file exchange is mindless work at its worst: boring and
repetitive, requiring intense concentration. The problem is
compounded when the system hangs up between mouse clicks,
requiring the user to stare at a dead screen for as many as 30
seconds before the server responds.

Asynchronous Discussions

In contrast to the file exchange system, WebCT's discussion
database (called "bulletins") is as good as any I have
worked with in the past. For my graduate course,
"bulletins" house numerous ongoing discussions (called
"forums") that students initiate. Creating the forums
is easy, and if desired, forum access may be limited to specific
participants; WebCT efficiently manages the process. When the
course manager indicates that a forum will be private, the system
quickly produces a list of the class members from which to
select. For the purposes of grading, I use the
"compile" feature to select some or all of the
contributions and compile them into a continuous text. This
technique avoids the excess labor involved in opening each
contribution separately, a task that gets tiresome when performed
50 times.

For my business writing course, I use the bulletins to manage
student peer reviews. Forty students are placed in teams, and
each person reviews the work of his or her team members, which
produces a total of 120 reviews. To organize these reviews, I
create a limited access forum for each team. Students post a
review in a message box and route it to the right forum with a
drop-down menu. The system works well for students because it is
extremely directive; it simplifies the path they must follow
either to post or to read a review. The system works well for
instructors for two reasons. First, the forum set-up is
automated; second, the select and compile feature allows
instructors to single out any subset of student review (e.g., the
three reviews written by a single student) for easy reading.

Conclusion

As the above example suggests, WebCT already provides
significant powers that are unavailable to conventional teachers.
The trade-off, of course, is time, time that most teachers do not
have or do not wish to expend on digital instruction. Given this
key constraint, what will it take for teachers (like farmers
trading mules for tractors) to adopt CMS tools en masse? As
a representative of the current generation of course management
systems, WebCT suggests an answer to this question.

First, the future CMS will entail very little wait time for
any of its processes. A mouse click will produce an instant
reaction, and system functions will require the absolute minimum
number of clicks.

Second, more of the system functions will be automated. The
prime candidate for such automation is file exchange. Since the
education system probably will continue its dependence upon
writing to evaluate learning, the inevitable conversion from
paper to bit-based documents will require a simple and powerful
tool to support the submission, review, and return process. Newer
versions of the CMS do have batch downloading systems, which is a
step in the right direction, but it still falls short of the
proven simplicity of paper exchanges. The CMS of the future will
have a data management system that, with a single mouse click,
uploads or downloads a batch of documents and routes them
directly to the desired recipients hard drives.

Third, the CMS will incorporate the document-sharing and
group-editing technologies developed elsewhere so that students
and teachers do much of their work without ever having to leave
the system.

Fourth, to satisfy the needs of teachers who feel limited by
imposed systems and structures, the future CMS will plug and play
a broad array of independently produced learning modules and will
allow individuals to customize much of the system (e.g., the
graphical user interface) in other ways.

For now, the potential CMS market consists of teachers who do
not know about or are avoiding the technology. For the former,
the systems are far too complicated. For the latter, those who
would rather build their own sites, the CMS is complicated in the
wrong ways; it does less elegantly what these teachers can do
themselves. But all of this will change. When a truly
advanced CMS arrives, it will be friendly enough to attract
teachers who do not know any HTML, and it will be powerful enough
to attract technology savants who recognize that their own Web
sites cannot compete.